The American West: A Very Short Introduction

Stephen Aron

Description

Part geographical location, part time period, and part state of mind, the American West is a concept often invoked but rarely defined. Though popular culture has carved out a short and specific time and place for the region, author and longtime Californian Stephen Aron tracks "the West" from the building of the Cahokia Mounds around 900 AD to the post-World War II migration to California. His Very Short Introduction stretches the chronology, enlarges the geography, and varies the casting, providing a history of the American West that is longer, larger, and more complicated than popular culture has previously suggested. It is a history of how portions of North America became Wests, how parts of these became American, and how ultimately American Wests became the American West.

Aron begins by describing the expansion of Indian North America in the centuries before and during its early encounters with Europeans. He then explores the origins of American westward expansion from the Seven Years' War to the 1830s, focusing on the western frontier at the time: the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. He traces the narrative - temporally and geographically - through the discovery of gold in California in the mid-nineteenth century and the subsequent rush to the Pacific Slope. He shows how the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902 brought an unprecedented level of federal control to the region, linking the West more closely to the rest of the United States, and how World War II brought a new rush of population (particularly to California), further raising the federal government's profile in the region and heightening the connections between the West and the wider world.

Authoritative, lucid, and ranging widely over issues of environment, people, and identity, this is the American West stripped of its myths. The complex convergence of peoples, polities, and cultures that has decisively shaped the history of the American West serves as the key interpretive thread through this Very Short Introduction.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The American West: A Very Short Introduction

Stephen Aron

Table of Contents

List of illustrations Introduction Chapter One: The View from Cahokia Chapter Two: Empires and Enclaves Chapter Three: Making the First American West Chapter Four: Taking the Farther West Chapter Five: The Whitening of the West Chapter Six: The Watering of the West Chapter Seven: The Worldly West Chapter Eight: The View from Mt. Lee References Further reading Index

The American West: A Very Short Introduction

Stephen Aron

Author Information

Stephen Aron, Professor of History and Vice Chair for Academic Personnel, University of California, Los Angeles

Stephen Aron is professor of history at UCLA and chair of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center. He is the author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay and American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State, the co-author of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World from the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present, and the co-editor of Trading Cultures: The Worldsof Western Merchants.

The American West: A Very Short Introduction

Stephen Aron

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The American West: A Very Short Introduction

Stephen Aron

Reading Guide

Questions for Thought and Discussion

How has the conflation of myth and history made it hard to disentangle the stories we have told about the development of the West from our understanding of what really happened?

In what ways has the gap between projections and reality shaped the development of the West and confounded our interpretations of its history?

With what conceptions about the West and its history did you come to this book? How has reading it challenged those conceptions?

In what ways do the maps in this book (and other books) distill history? In what ways do they distort it?

Should the book have been titled “The American Wests” as opposed to “The American West”?

How did “the preference for convergence over conversion” shape the history of North American frontiers and the modern American West?

Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Can you find examples of such “rhymes” in this book?

How did the precolonial experiences of American Indians prepare them for their encounters with Europeans? In what ways did it fail to prepare them?

What do you make of the author’s claim that the witchcraft episode that occurred in Santa Fe in 1692 “better reflected and was more important to the broader colonial history of North America” than the far more familiar incident that year in Salem?

To what should one attribute the differences in the relations between various Indian groups and Spanish, French, and British colonizers?

How did the ebbing of imperial rivalries weaken the position of Indians and usher the Americanization of western North America?

Is it appropriate to use anachronistic terms such as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” to describe the dispossession and decimation of American Indians?

Why did Mexico invite American immigration if it feared American expansion? How might this policy have worked?

What were the stakes of “whiteness” in the nineteenth-century West? How did the meaning and boundaries of this color line shift during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

How successful have reclamation and conservation efforts been? With the benefit of historical hindsight, what alternatives would you propose?

What explains the often contentious relationship between westerners and the federal government?

Which “westerns” make for the best history? Does that question matter when assessing the genre?

The book includes an image of John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress.” How might you revise this picture to better reflect the reality of American westward expansion during the nineteenth century? How would you update it to incorporate more recent history?

Critics of recent scholarship about the West have argued that “revisionists” have turned a once triumphant history into a course in “failure studies.” Should that critique be leveled at this book?

Has the diversity of the American West made it “hopelessly heterogeneous”? Does this history recounted in this book offer any hope about western (and American) heterogeneity?

Other books by the author

How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay,

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World from the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present (co-author)

Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants (co-editor)

Further reading suggestions can be found at the back of The American West: A Very Short Introduction